Sunday, September 09, 2007
Solitude and old music
And I realized that old things are pleasant for me.
But the point of this essay is the melding of music and my circumstances. Tonight I am watching this alone in my bed. I can tap my toe, nod my head, and feel the words in the fiber of my soul. But I'm doing this in a solitary way.
And extending this sensation is easy- being alone in a couple of months, being alone in a couple of decades- will I be watching this show as its own form of "golden oldie" in 20 years? Will I have leathery skin on the back of my hands? Will someone have to bring me my dinner in an old folks home? And will these songs still have that same ability to take me back to when I was young and stupid and happy?
Well, for a lot of the time while these songs were etching themselves into the DNA of my musical memory, I was alone, too. These songs came to my consciousness before my now-divorced family did. It seems like such a long time ago, when I heard these songs and when I had my first son. A lot of things have happened since then. I've done a few things I'm not sure I'd do again, and I've done some things I don't know how to avoid having done.
Life is a search. You search for love, for meaning, for romance, for memorable events. Sometimes you find such things, other times your life runs out bleakly, like sand through an hourglass. But even the Big Events become memories. I remember being in the delivery room when each of my children were born. I remember teaching my four-year-old big son to ride his bike, taking my small seven-year-old daughter to swim in the big pool and hearing my small three-year-old son tell me that he liked to run. I remember a very young, nubile girl who trusted me with her body: that girl became a deceitful, bitter woman and I regret that I don't know how she made that transition.
But these songs were there for the journey. Folk songs that had a message, like "Where have all the flowers gone" and slightly goofy, yet pointed songs like "The MTA." I don't think of Judy Collins very often, but she remains a great singer. She was there when I was in college, learning to think about meaningful things. Now her voice brings me back to 1963 and my search for something that would make sense, that would fulfill something. I haven't found the answer yet, but I know I'm better equipped to make the search. Trouble is, I'm not sure there is something out there that is the Big Answer to my Big Question.
So it's 02:11. I should have been asleep hours ago, but I'm awake and trying to make sense of my life- old music makes me 18 again, 25 again, young and curious and naive and hopeful again. I sift through my parents' values, through what my teachers tried to teach me, through what the Army taught me, and even through what I surprised myself with. I was alone when I went to Oslo and saw the huge obelisk, the tower of people. I was alone when I rode my motorcycle on a whim at five in the afternoon from San Leandro to Yosemite, sleeping in my pup tent that I tied to the tail light and handlebar of my old Honda 305. I was alone when I came home late at night and made a 50-foot telephone to talk with the young girl that would be my wife.
Judy Collins looks older, but she still sounds nice. Tommy and Dickie Smothers look older, but they still have that charm and spark and needle each other. The Kingston Trio still warbles marvelously. And a nice, middle-aged lady in the audience, lit up with purple and pink lights, knows the words, and smiles while she sings along. But each person in the audience is sharing the experience with everyone else in the audience. I'm sharing this with myself. Might be, this bit of knowledge is the first step in knowing a bit of that Big Answer. Or this might just be one more piece of useless trivia of my life. Ask me again, OK?
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
The ueberkontrollant bee-atch said, “No more emails”
Yep, "ueberkontrollant" is a word I coined myself. I like it. "Bee-atch" is just an easy plagiarism from my kids' vocabulary. That's the comical, lexical gloss for something deeper and more significant. "Ueberkontrollant" is my transliteration of "Over Controlling" with that negative cachet of stereotypical German caricature- the Nazi officer who insists on having every little thing *his* way. Gene Wilder's Nazis and Nurse Ratchet are classic examples of this caricature. But "over controlling" is a subjective evaluation- one person looks at something and decides that the other person is"over controlling." In some ways, I reckon we're all a bit controlling. What gives this lexical creation some relevant meaning is agreement that "You can't email anyone" is extreme, that it's beyond the normal give-and-take of a marriage's compromises.
In my case, it seems to have been the outcome of her lack of trust- While she didn't say so, her implication was "I can't trust you to refrain from developing a romantic (thus dangerous to our marriage) relationship via emails, so I want you to stop emailing, period." Emails are a form of communication. Communication enables intimacy. Maybe she'd found out for herself how intimate you can be in internet communications and she felt that if I became as intimate as she'd become, that could threaten our marriage.
Yep, I think this could have been a dilemma for her- allow me the freedom to do as I want, potentially finding romance, or restrain my behavior so I'd never stray from marital fidelity. The former could have brought an end to our marriage; the latter shook it beyond repair. If I'd agreed to stop internet communication, she'd have felt better, but only until something else might have come up that she considered a threat- maybe I'd have to work late or I'd want to do some renfaire camping or I'd help a gal at work change her tire. While emails cumulatively constitute intimacy (the more you write, the more you understand the other person), even casual contact- lunch with work folks- can lead to further contact. Pretty soon, anything I do could become an eventual (hence too-real) threat to our marriage. The primal motive in all this could be her insecurity. This could have been her way of saying, "There's so little good about me that any normal man would be looking for something else if he were married to me." If this were so, it would have been very difficult to admit that you're less than worthy.
I don't think this conundrum is sufficient to proclaim her "no internet communication" edict. I think she should have gone to counseling with me and tried to find a way for us to make the marriage better. But she chose not to go. She wanted things her way and no other way. Pity, too, since I think she lost a lot through her intransigence. I lost, too. But I'm not sure the alternative would have made our marriage palatable: If I'd agreed, "OK, no more internet," we'd have remained married technically. But we'd not have been happy. She'd have spent her time watching me for tell-tale signs of infidelity and I'd have chafed at her gumshoe style.
From a perspective of two-plus years, I feel there wasn't another alternative. I don't know how she felt when I refused to stop my emails, but she could have felt I was on the brink of something intimate, something that would have shattered our marriage. I do know that she took half of our money, $100,000, and stashed it somewhere so I wouldn't know where it was.
I agree- a lot depends on one person who's unwilling to communicate. Yep, I think that was Bonnie- several times I tried to get her to go to counseling, but she didn't want to go.
This segs to me a bit- When I wanted to see a counselor with her, part of my motivation included an intense fear of being single. I'd been married for so long that being single petrified me. If I divorced, I'd become a dirty, smelly codger, wandering around in my underwear, eating tuna from a can I'd opened a few days ago, muttering to myself about Martians and cursing people who lived Ozzie and Harriet lives. I think that might have been a slightly irrational but based on an accurate projection of what my life has become. Yep, before, I had a lot of domestic bliss- hearth, family, all the superficial stuff that most people want. Heck, I even had the numbers- 35 years of being married. (I made 36 years, technically, but the last year or two were not very "married.") Since I filed for divorce, I've had the ability to choose what I do based on what I want to do. But I've also had a lot less of the "family" stuff that used to be so endearing. I'm not yet wandering around in my underwear, muttering about Martians, but I'm not the same as I was two years ago. I'm contemplating leaving the area, making biweekly visits with my small son a thing of the past. The pain of seeing him less seems to be diminished but the reasons for the diminished pain are the topic of another post.
Another time, I'll try to talk about what I miss- the illusion of intimacy, the actual intimacy, the romance, the support of internal family love.
